Marvel’s First Movie Named For A Heroine Still Spotlights A Dude

Marvel has announced that the sequel to this summer's Ant-Man will arrive in 2018 and will be called Ant-Man and the Wasp. This is exciting. But it also sort of sucks. Ant-Man features a tantalizing mid-credits sequence in which Evangeline Lilly's Hope Van Dyne gets her own superhero suit, and says, "It's about damn time." As I wrote back in July, it's a moment that made me want to cheer. But it also left me simmering with frustration, because Hope is sidelined throughout the movie, which focuses on Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd). But there was hope for, um, Hope and the Wasp. Director Peyton Reed told Refinery29, "If we are fortunate enough to get to do a sequel, that would be a story I would be very excited to tell." Now, Marvel is going to tell that story, making the Wasp the first heroine to get her name in the title for a Marvel Studios movie. There's just one caveat that makes this something of a pyrrhic victory. The addition of Ant-Man and the Wasp to the schedule means that Captain Marvel, which would have been Marvel's first female superhero flick, will now arrive in March 2019 instead of November 2018. So, the movie that gives a woman sole billing is getting pushed in favor of a movie that has a woman playing second banana — in the title, anyway — to a man. The delay of Captain Marvel, which is now scheduled to arrive about two years after Warner Bros. and DC Comic's Wonder Woman movie, has made some on Twitter angry.

We're excited for Hope to get her due, but the announcement would seem more promising if the movie were called simply The Wasp, or if it weren't coming at the expense of another super-heroine.